All Utilitarians Should Be Classical Utilitarians

This is a crosspost from my blog post.

I recently had the great joy of meeting a group of utilitarians, but, to my complete horror, out of the twelve of them, not a single one was a classical utilitarian.

In case you don’t know, classical utilitarianism was the original form of utilitarianism promoted by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. It is often referred to as total hedonic utilitarianism, and it holds that, most basically, when one is choosing what action to take, they always ought to always take the action which produces the greatest total happiness minus suffering.

Even though this conception of utilitarianism is perfect just the way it is, people always want to modify it in some way.

That’s why, in today’s post, I want to explain each of their alternative views to classical utilitarianism, and why I think they’re wrong.

Incorrect view #1: There’s goods other than happiness

Some people have an objective list theory of well-being, which means that they believe that there are goods other than happiness that are good for people. Some candidate goods include knowledge, wisdom, aesthetic appreciation, loving relationships, and autonomy. Following this view, they argue that, when working to make the world better, we should focus on also increasing things like beauty and the accumulation of knowledge rather than just happiness.

I disagree with this view for three reasons:

First, the only reason we think these other goods are valuable is because they produce happiness. If knowledge, beauty, or love didn’t bring us joy, I don’t think we would care about them at all. Given this, it seems like we should focus on the reason we care about these goods rather than the goods themselves.

Second, it seems weird to think that something is good for someone if they don’t think that it’s good for themself. For instance, many utilitarians believe that social connections are good for all people, but hermits don’t believe that social connections are good for them. In contrast, utilitarians believe that happiness is good for people, and people almost universally believe that it is good for themselves too.

Last, happiness is the only good that you can directly experience. You may tell me that relationships are good, but I cannot measure the value of relationships directly. I can only measure how they make me feel, which is what I think we should really care about.

Incorrect view #2: Suffering outweighs happiness

Many utilitarians think that we should care much more about suffering than happiness.

I suspect that they think this for two reasons.

First, humans are naturally very risk averse. They’re willing to go to great lengths to avoid even small amounts of suffering, but they’re unwilling to take significant risks in order to experience profound happiness. Even though this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, I think it biases people towards thinking that suffering and happiness aren’t equally important when they actually are.

Second, most people rarely experience profound happiness so they’re unable to compare it to profound suffering. Although it’s very common for people to experience deep suffering, it’s very rare that people experience profound joy. As a result, I think that people accidentally believe that deep suffering is more bad than profound joy is good, but that they actually only believe this because they haven’t experienced enough profound joy to make an accurate comparison

If we take these two factors into consideration, it seems like we should actually weigh happiness and suffering pretty equally given that they’re simply two sides of the exact same scale.

Incorrect view #3: Moral views shouldn’t be too demanding

Classical utilitarians believe that correct actions are those that produce the most good. This means that, even if you do an action that’s extremely good but not the very best action that you could have done, you’re still doing an incorrect action.

People dislike this because it leads to what they call the demandingness problem, the fact that classical utilitarianism has virtually no limits on what it can demand of you. So long as an action produces the most good overall, you are always demanded to take it no matter how much suffering it causes you to endure.

To get around this problem, utilitarians have come up with many alternatives to classical utilitarianism that are less demanding. For instance, scalar utilitarians argue that actions can exist on a spectrum in terms of how good they are, such that actions that produce a significant amount of good are still considered good even if they don’t produce as much good as possible. Similarly, satisficing utilitarians argue that we have a duty to do good, but that the obligation only requires us to do a certain minimal amount of good.

I disagree with these views. Just because classical utilitarianism is demanding, that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

For one, from the perspective of the universe, all of our suffering and happiness matters equally. As such, when one person experiences a small amount of suffering to avert the intense suffering of another, the world is made a better place because the total suffering is reduced. Even if it seems weird to demand significant suffering from one individual, it’s important to remember that things are being made better overall.

For two, most people actually already believe in extreme demandingness in many circumstances. For instance, virtually everyone believes that a slave holder should free all of his slaves even if it would cause him to become homeless. And, similarly, most people believe that you should raise a child until adulthood even if the child was conceived by accident. If we’re willing to accept extreme demandingness in certain situations, I see no reason not to accept it in all situations.

Incorrect view #4: The repugnant conclusion is unacceptable

Classical utilitarians hold a total view of population ethics. This means that, when assessing the value of a world, they do simply by adding up the total welfare of all individuals within that world.

For instance, if one world has a thousand people who would rate their lives 8/10 (on a scale from -10 to 10) and another world has three thousand people who would rate their lives 7/10, then, according to classical utilitarianism, the second world is better than the first.

Critics argue that this is problematic because it leads to “the repugnant conclusion.” If one world has a trillion people who would rate their lives .001/10 and another world has a thousand people who would rate their lives 10/10, then, according to classical utilitarianism, world B is better than world A. They argue that this is unacceptable because, intuitively, a world with people whose lives are barely worth living should have very little value.

To get around this, they argue that we should, instead, take other factors into account when determining the value of the world such as the average welfare of all people within the world or whether each person’s welfare is above a certain threshold.

I disagree that doing this is necessary since I don’t think that the repugnant conclusion is repugnant at all.

For one, the math indicates that the total welfare is higher so I’m willing to trust the math.

For two, just because .001 is low, that doesn’t mean that it’s insignificant or bad. I would rather have a life that’s .001/10 than not have a life at all. And, just to press the point, it seems like bugs probably have very low experiences of welfare. If it turned out that bugs are overall happy, would you want to get rid of them just because, as individuals, they’re only barely happy?

Third, from the perspective of the universe, the experiences of all people in any world are actually just one large composite. As such, a trillion barely happy people actually does combine to create a level of ecstasy that far surpasses the joy that a thousand really happy people would experience.

Lastly, even at a personal level, I would rather live for a trillion years barely happy than merely a thousand years extremely happy. After all, a life barely worth living is still a life worth living.

Discuss